Susan Clark of Santa Monica, Calif., who opposes health care reform, stands with a red hand painted over her mouth to represent what she said is socialism taking away her choices and rights, in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Wednesday, March 28, 2012, on the final day of arguments regarding the health care law signed by President Barack Obama.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court closed an extraordinary three-day review of President Barack Obama’s health-care law Wednesday with its conservative majority signaling that it may be on the brink of a major redefinition of the federal government’s power.

Justices on the right of the deeply divided court appear at least open to declaring the heart of the overhaul unconstitutional, voiding the rest of the 2,700-page law and even scrapping the underpinnings of Medicaid, a federal-state partnership that has existed for nearly 50 years.

Much can happen between now and the expected ruling this summer, and a far more moderate tone may emerge. Broad statements come more easily in the court’s intense oral arguments than in majority opinions.

But Solicitor General Donald Verrilli closed more than six hours of questioning by making an unusual and emotional plea to the justices for restraint.

He asked them to respect Congress’ judgment rather than insert themselves into a partisan battle that has roiled the political landscape since the law was passed in 2010.

“The Congress struggled with the issue of how to deal with this profound problem of 40 million people without health care for many years, and it made a judgment,” Verrilli told the justices.

“Maybe they were right, maybe they weren’t, but this is something about which the people of the United States can deliberate and they can vote, and if they think it needs to be changed, they can change it.”

Verrilli made a direct appeal to Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered pivotal in the case because he is the conservative most often willing to side with the court’s liberal bloc. On Tuesday, Kennedy said he worried that the law’s mandate that almost every American either secure health insurance or pay a penalty undermines personal liberty and carries a “heavy burden of justification” under the Constitution.

Verrilli spoke about “millions of people with chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease” who would be “unshackled” from their conditions and about families who would be freed from financial harm caused by high medical costs. The law will help ensure that they “have the opportunity to enjoy the blessings of liberty,” he said.

Paul Clement, representing Florida and 25 other states objecting to the health-care law, responded that “it’s a very funny conception of liberty that forces somebody to purchase an insurance policy whether they want it or not.”

The examination of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was unlike any the court has conducted in decades. It has been nearly 50 years since justices have devoted so much time to a subject.

Before this week’s arguments, many lawyers who practice before the court had said privately that they thought the court’s precedents indicated that the Obama administration would emerge the victor. And the court’s four liberal justices showed themselves to be comfortable with the assertion of federal power in the law.

But there was deep skepticism among the conservatives. At times, Verrilli seemed shaken by the intensity of the questions.

Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had wondered earlier in the day whether her colleagues were on a “wrecking operation” or a “salvage job” as they were deciding what to do about the rest of the law should the individual mandate be declared unconstitutional.

The court’s divisions were on vivid display Wednesday during a discussion of the law’s Medicaid expansion, which would give states more federal money if they agreed to enroll more of the poor. States can refuse, but only if they pull out of the program altogether.

The states challenging the legislation say that is not an option. The Medicaid program has grown so large that it is impossible to forgo federal funding and still provide medical care to the poor, they say.

The question before the Supreme Court now is whether the law would violate limits the court has set in the past, that the federal government cannot impose conditions “so coercive as to pass the point at which pressure turns into compulsion.”

Liberal justices clearly thought the states’ argument lacked merit.

“Why is a big gift by the federal government a matter of coercion?” asked Justice Elena Kagan.

But Justice Samuel Alito said in passing the health-care legislation, Congress operated on the assumption that the Medicaid program had become so large and essential that no state could turn down the government’s offer.

“When that’s the case, how can that not be coercion?” he asked Verrilli.

It was in a discussion about what Congress would prefer if the mandate fell — all of the law minus the mandate, most of the law or none of the law — that the court began to discuss the political dimensions of its decision, and the partisan climate in which it operates.

Later in the day, as Clement presented the arguments of the states he represented against the Medicaid provision, Ginsburg reminded him that other states had filed a brief with the court saying they want the federal expansion.

Justice Antonin Scalia asked: “Mr. Clement, I didn’t take the time to figure this out, but maybe you did. Is there any chance at all that 26 states opposing it have Republican governors and all of the states supporting it have Democratic governors? Is that possible?”

The owners of Boulder’s Sterling University Peaks apartments, who this summer were cited for illegally subdividing 92 bedrooms in the complex, have reached an agreement to settle the case for $410,000, the city announced Thursday.